Journal of Sacred Work

Never turn over the guidance of your soul to others.  – Erie Chapman

   A man was swimming across a lake with a rock in his hand. Under the weight of the rock and the difficulty of swimming with one arm, he began to drown. "Let go of the rock," voices shouted. But the man continued trying to swim. As he continued to struggle, the voices shouted louder, "Let go of the rock." But the man would not release his grip even though he could now barely stay afloat. Finally, with his last breath, he shouted back to the voices, "I can’t let go. It’s mine." And with that, he drowned.
   Each of us carries around rocks we will not release because we are so attached to the comfort we think they provide. We fight to hold onto patterns that are drowning us because we think we own them. We even give up the guidance of our souls just to hang onto doing our jobs the old way, or the way we think an oppressive boss may expect…

   When our job is new, it can seem fresh, exciting, and terrifying. After awhile, we become familiar with our work and a strange myth settles into our hearts. We think we own our jobs. As owners, we may fall into lazy thought patterns of minimum effort. The same may be said of relationships like marriage.
   I know a man whose grip on both has been severely threatened, yet he will not let go of either stone he thinks he owns. First, his wife of many years had an affair and told him she wanted to leave both him and their children. He resisted. Over many months, she told him repeatedly that she didn’t love him and wanted to be free of their marriage. Still, he struggled to try and hold on to her though the voices of all of his friends called to him to let go.
   Simultaneously, he began to drown in his job as he took more and more time off to try and address his domestic crisis.
   Voices around him called louder for him to let go of the wife who didn’t love him. "I can’t" he told me and others. And what I heard in the echo following that silence was a line unspoken: "I can’t let her go because she’s mine."
   My friend’s decision is more difficult than it may appear. Doesn’t love calls us to stay faithful, even when the other may have been unfaithful? Aren’t we supposed to keep loving our children even if they seem to hate us? Here is the distinction that may help bring clarity. It begins with the truth that we never own other people even though we often think that we do. We talk of "my children," "my mother," "my friends." But none of these people are truly ours and they must all find their own freedom. So the distinction is between loving and holding. We may continue to love the other while simultaneously letting go of the relationship we once had.
   As often happens with bad fortune, a second blow struck my friend. "I’ve been demoted," he told me one day. "Can you believe it? After nineteen years of working my head off at my job, they’ve demoted me!"
   The forces of change are calling out to my friend to let go of his old way of life. Love calls him to continue to care for his wife and his work and to let go of the kind of relationship he has had with both. But he continues to swim through both situations struggling to hold a wife who doesn’t love him and to keep his grasp on a job where he isn’t using his best gifts.
   It is true that real love calls for heroic sacrifice. The challenge is to know when to hold on, and even to die for what we believe, and when to let go so that we are free to swim in a new and better direction.
   Is the way you are doing your job right now something you want to hold onto for the rest of your life? Is there a new and bolder way you could be giving care that would free you to swim in a new direction? If you are a leader, are you making the mistake of referring to your staff as "my employees?" Because the truth is, our fellow staff are not "ours," and to treat them as possessions is to demean their humanity – an our own.
   It takes so much courage to let go of familiar patterns and to strike out on a new course. New pathways are unfamiliar and disorienting at first. They seem to hold danger and risk. The old stone of fear calls out to us, "what if you fail?" And what if you do?
   I have heard my friend repeat to himself several times the old Nietzsche wisdom, "Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger." He repeats it so often, I can tell he doesn’t believe it. Yet the truth is that he will, one day, become stronger if he can learn to both love and let go. To do this, he will need to reclaim control of a soul whose guidance he has surrendered to a woman who doesn’t love their marriage and a job that is sucking away his best creativity.
   What does it mean to be true to our souls? How much courage does it take to let go of the stone and to swim in a new direction?

-Erie Chapman